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My Google job was tedious and pointless

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101–110 of 348 posts

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#101
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need emotional support from your work colleagues because the country has elected a president you don't like, you have a problem.

There's a HUGE difference between "a president you don't like" and "a president who's entire platform was removing people like you from the country".

If the majority of the country doesn't want you in, then tough titty. I would not stay somewhere where I'm not welcome.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#102

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

> and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified.

Its called losing, thats what it feels like, you are missing that there are A LOT of winners.

Your sentiment is reinforced by presidential faux pas but thats a total sideshow to how people are successfully navigating this political environment, using it as a catalyst even for trade and commerce outcomes that will long outlast this administration.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#103
post #44
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was deeply disturbed by the United States electing a jingoistic, misogynistic racist and abuser, I really appreciated that I got some fucking emotional support from my colleagues. Never mind that he ran on a platform of throwing a significant portion of the company out of the country. Step into the shoes of someone holding an H1B for one moment, please.

This post is being downvoted and I wish it wasn't, because it's a great example of the exact issue at hand. You might say that it is overly emotional, or too reactionary, or that the tone isn't appropriate, but think - really think! - what it would be like to wake up one morning to the unexpected shock that a President has been elected on the very possible platform of kicking you out of the country and ruining the li…

Except there was absolutely no talk during the campaign or after the election about cancelling H1B visas...

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#104
post #62

While the job doesn't sound like it involves "cool things that matter" and paints a pretty believable picture of working at a large corporation, I do find it interesting that this was published by thr Washington Post. Being owned by Amazon, a direct competitor to Google on many fronts (the war for cloud computing market share is/will continue to be huge), it seems suspicious that this is truly unbiased coverage. It s…

The Washington Post is not owned by Amazon. It is owned by Jeff Bezos, who also is CEO of Amazon.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#105

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

I've noticed a TON of conversation on HN lately about how emotional/hysterical anti-Trump people are. Aside from the obvious fallacy (being emotional doesn't make you wrong), I think it's part of the anti-anti-Trump phenomenon: most people can't bring themselves to actually defend Trump but they are so annoyed by liberals that they devote their political energy to mocking and minimizing his critics.

My take: bad things are bad, and other people overstating their badness does not make them good.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their coworkers verbally over the coals. The idea that as long as you aren't yelling, swearing, or actively insulting someone you are not treating them poorly is on…

Google has lots of polite disagreement internally, just look at Steve Yegge's memos.

This isn't evidence against the echo chamber claim. An example of valid evidence might be rational debate about a conservative memo, as opposed to censorship, demonization, slander, etc.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#107
post #70
post #47

>Google HR uses the TextExpander program, which populates email templates with salutations, job description links and questions. All we have to do is press two keys (mine are semicolon followed by the letter “C”). There’s also space for fill-in-the-blanks: one for the candidate’s name (“Hey Mark”) and another at the end for the day of the week (“Enjoy your Thursday!”), so the message is personal. This step should hav…

Automated emails are pretty shit, and easy to spot. They also tend to turn off most people, making recruiting more difficult.

Yep. Any time I see a recruiter try to automate initial contact using a tool like Jobdiva or some such, it's an instant disqualification. Most of the time it's just plain shotgunned out and I never hear anything beyond the initial email. I had one recruiter, after doing that, call me and inquire -- I told him no, and explained to him that I don't do business with those who willingly use spamming tools.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#109

I worked at Google in a more technical role but I sympathize with this guy. The culture was awful and empty. It was sugar-coated candies and colors and happy, happy, happy like it was meant for a kindergartener. The politics were thick and covered everything. Executives got on stage at a company meeting and cried about the election. It was a cult, and not in the good way that a startup can sometimes be, but in a stal…

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

What a blatant false dichotomy.

Re: My Google job was tedious and pointless

#110
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, a lot of people were upset over the election, and given what's happened over the last ten months, those feelings seem to have been justified. But yeah, god damn a company for having a culture where people don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. God forbid we grow out of Kindergarten and get back to the real world where people are unhappy and take out their frustrations by raking their cowor…

I work at a Silicon Valley company where nobody cried about the election (even if they were upset), and we don't go around acting like jerks towards one another. You're definitely positing a false dichotomy here and I'm not even sure how you came up with "either people are crying over Trump xor they are assholes to each other every day".

Agreed. This is "feelings over professionalism." If you're so uncontrollably emotional that you can't help but waste company time, take a sick day. But I think the problem is that they're not uncontrollable, rather they're very in control and are enacting a performance for their audience. Thus they need an audience.
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